Thursdays and Tallow Stains
by tepid sponge bath
Summary: John Watson lost Sherlock Holmes, but he is determined to get him back, even through means eldritch and arcane and obviously illogical, even if the consulting detective is as unreachable as somewhere East of the Sun and West of the Moon. A Post-Reichenbach retelling of the Norse fairy tale for Let's Write Sherlock's second challenge.
1. Prologue: Paths

**Disclaimer**: I own none of the stories involved – especially the BBC's _Sherlock_ – and I make no monetary profit from this.

**Note: **This was written for Let's Write Sherlock's second challenge, and is a retelling of one of my favorite fairy tales of all, _East of the Sun and West of the Moon_, in which many liberties have been taken. Many and extensive liberties. But trust me, please?

There will be more than one fairy tale involved here, though, and if I've horribly botched any tale or legend, please feel free to call my attention to it.

**Thursdays and Tallow Stains**

_For every evil under the sun,_

_There is a remedy, or there is none._

_If there be one, try to find it;_

_If there be none, never mind it._

Traditional nursery rhyme

**Prologue: Paths**

The corridor was dark, and, John thought dimly, rather like the ones in St. Bart's at night, as he remembered them from when he was earning the letters that came after his name, only this particular corridor seemed to be interminable, even if he could make out the faint red neon smudge of the _EXIT_sign at the end of it.

He heard footsteps behind him, echoing his own just within the edge of his hearing. He knew who they belonged to, or he thought he did, punctuated as they were with the swish of a heavy coat – or was it just the wind in the curtains in the rooms? And, when it came to that, when had he last heard those footsteps go at such a slow and measured pace? (_Hardly ever._)

There are rules, and there are rules. John knew, as you did in dreams, that he shouldn't, oughtn't, absolutely must not on-pain-of-crushing-failure look behind him until he reached the exit.

It was harder than it sounded.

Uncertainty ate away at him, and John wished he had something – a pocket handkerchief, a certain blue scarf – to use as a blindfold, but inexplicably all he seemed to be wearing was his dressing gown, and there were nothing but pomegranate seeds in his pockets. Besides, he tried to reason as he stared fixedly into the distance in front of him, a blindfold wouldn't _actually_ stop him from turning his head, and that would probably be what counted.

But, oh, it was difficult. The footsteps behind him faltered sometimes, and grew fainter, and while it would have been entirely keeping with who he thought it was to be sidetracked by other, more interesting things along the way, well, he wasn't _sure_ who it was, was he? He was just going on a hope and a prayer and a vague sense of familiarity.

The footsteps stopped entirely after he passed a junction that led to another long, dark hallway, and John went on for a bit past that, biting his lip, his hands pushed in among the pomegranate seeds in his pockets, desperately trying to ignore the fact that all he heard now was the slap of his own bare feet on the linoleum. He wasn't imagining it, he _knew_ it, and when he decided that he knew it, he panicked, and he turned a fraction of an inch, trying to sneak a look behind him out of the corner of his eye.

The world went wrong as soon as he did it. Lights snapped on, harsh and fluorescent, and there was nobody else in the corridor at all.

And John Watson woke up. He swore once at his disobedience, swore a second time when he saw the time, and swore thrice for good measure.

As he shifted in bed, trying to get just a few more minutes of rest, he thought he heard a dry voice saying. "You know, I think you might be on the wrong path there."

"Sod off," mumbled John into his pillow, "And if you don't let me sleep, I swear to God I'll take the poker and smash you to pieces."

**Notes: **This chapter takes inspiration from the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the pomegranate seeds are, of course, a reference to how Persephone was made to stay in the Underworld.


	2. Cut-Glass

**Part One: Cut-Glass**

John Watson had never thought of Thursdays as things that were particularly difficult to get a hang of. They had just sort of slipped by more or less blamelessly (Wednesdays though, _Wednesdays_ were another matter entirely, the sneaky buggers – _them_you had to watch). Only now, ever since the first Thursday following Sherlock's funeral, John found himself throwing his lot in with Arthur Dent on the subject.

It wasn't just that the dreams were strange. John had always been a lucid dreamer, and, well, dreams were never really normal, were they? What was unusual was the accompanying conviction that if he could only dream the right dream in the right way, he could somehow get Sherlock back.

Yes, it was nonsense, and he knew it, and he would never _ever_tell another living soul. When he was awake,_properly_ awake and not stuck in the muddled half-consciousness between sleep and actual waking, he told himself that it was a way of coping, that without the dreams and the deeply misplaced sense of purpose, he'd have gone mad (or perhaps _madder_) long ago and found a rooftop to walk off of himself.

What he thought as he drifted off on Wednesday nights, though, was entirely different.

Firstly, he didn't want to live in a world where it wasn't true that Sherlock could come back, even through means eldritch and arcane and obviously illogical. And, secondly, he knew that Sherlock's fall had been his fault so it stood to reason that he should be able to fix it, if he could find a way. Oh, it wasn't entirely on him, he knew that, he wasn't stupid, Moriarty had gotten to Sherlock somehow, had forced to say and do what he had said and done, and if anybody should take the blame for it, it was the consulting criminal, hands down. But John knew he'd had a part in it too. He'd left Sherlock alone at Bart's on the strength of a stranger's phone call, and, to make matters worse, he'd gotten angry and said words that were as indelible as tallow stains on a white silk shirt. He of all people should have known that Sherlock wasn't such a beast as that.

And so for believing in some small part and for the briefest instant what everybody else said and suspected about his flatmate, he had found himself alone in the world again, with the small selfsame bundle of belongings that he'd brought with him to Baker Street.

In any case, he dreamed strange and vivid things in the early hours of Thursday, between midnight and dawn. He knew, as a vague factoid dimly remembered from the literature of his school days, that that was when true dreams were supposed to happen, but he didn't set much store by that. What he knew for a fact was that he woke up each Thursday exhausted, as if he'd never slept at all, and he'd toss and turn in his sweaty sheets, doing the best he could to sleep till noon. Daytime sleep didn't sit well with him, though. John found that it was rather like bad sex: it wasn't satisfying, no matter how long you went at it, but because you were horribly stuck somewhere between sated and unsated, you wanted more of it just in case it got better over time (it didn't). As the phenomenon of Thursdays went on, he arranged things at the new surgery so that he'd have Thursdays off, because although being grumpy and cross by himself around the flat wasn't very nice, it was certainly better than being grumpy and cross at patients and co-workers.

The flat wasn't 221B Baker Street anymore. He couldn't stand staying there, though he always meant to visit Mrs. Hudson, and he even managed to from time to time, just for tea and then he'd be off again before it got late. After one such visit, he'd taken the skull home with him, because Mrs. Hudson said that she couldn't stand the thing and was about to donate it to some school somewhere, and he didn't want to abandon something that Sherlock, however jokingly, had referred to as a friend. He put it on a shelf on his bedroom, and it was company, if of a singularly grim sort. At least it didn't mind John's dreaming.

For the most part, the dreams fit patterns of half-remembered legends and tales. There were rules, and there were rules: conditions had to be met, instructions had to be followed, and, though he always knew what they were, something or another was always just a bit too hard to fulfill.

The one where he was talking with a woman who kept half her face covered with a fall of hair and smelled sickly sweet, like something rotten (but John hadn't mentioned that, it wouldn't have been polite), had been particularly brief. She told him that he could have Sherlock back if everyone in the world wept over the loss of its only consulting detective, and John had said thanks, but no thanks, and turned his back. He had no illusions as to what other people thought of Sherlock Holmes, and what he thought of _them_ was unprintable in most media.

Equally short had been the one where he was sitting at a chessboard opposite a small, richly dressed man with a Gaelic accent so thick that you could have put it between two slices of bread and made a decent sandwich of it. He'd smiled knowingly at the doctor as he pushed one of his pawns forward, and John, knowing full well that he was hopeless at chess, woke up halfway through asking if they could maybe have a nice game of Cluedo instead.

There were others that went on for longer, and were thus harder to wake up from because of the cloying frustration and sorrow that came with them. It had been particularly difficult to come to terms with the one with the white rooster and the gray dog: John was supposed to find all of Sherlock's bones, and the rooster was supposed to crow over them, and the dog was supposed to bark, to bring the detective back to life, but he had missed the little stirrup-bone from Sherlock's left ear, and so all the crowing and barking amounted to naught.

This week there was a glass hill, as smooth as a windowpane and as steep as the side of a house. There had also been a horse, a huge copper-colored animal that had slipped about a third of the way up, and John had only stopped himself from sliding all the way down with it by throwing himself from its back at the last possible instant. He hoped the animal was all right (even if it was just a dream-horse): it had carried him pretty far, all things considered, until it was so hot that foam dripped from its sides. And that was all the thought he could spare for the poor thing, because it was all he could do to cling to the side of the hill. The edifice was smooth as a windowpane, yes, but it was as smooth as you could expect so huge a windowpane to be: there were little lumps and tiny cracks on its surface, and by some wild miracle, they were just enough for John to use as supports and toeholds.

It was a struggle, going up. A warm, light wind whipped at his clothes, and many of the edges he caught hold of were sharp, and they cut his fingers and his arms. There was something he needed at the top of the hill, though, much more than a princess and half a kingdom, and so John pulled himself up, inch by sharp, slippery inch.

After a long while, he was two thirds of the way up, and after still longer, he could see the very crest of the hill. The top was as flat as a tabletop, and about it was about the size of a table as well, and, when John Watson hoisted himself over the ledge, he saw that at the very center of it was a golden apple sitting on a purple cushion (and, unless he was very much mistaken, he knew that shade of purple).

"This is what all the fuss is about?" he said, incredulous, and he pulled himself up on his elbows to reach for the fruit. But in so doing, his right foot slipped from the little ridge he had rested it on, and down he slipped, cursing his luck.

Before he fell all the way down, however, the East Wind blew the golden apple into his outstretched hand, and his fingers closed around it as he tumbled down the glass hill.

John awoke aching all over, and his hands and arms were covered with what felt like innumerable paper cuts. There were two particularly deep ones near his elbows, right where they'd be if he'd tried to lever himself up onto a surface on his forearms. And when he rolled over, groaning sleepily, he found a perfect, round apple digging into the small of his back. He took it and held it up to the pre-dawn light filtering in through his window. It smelled very sweet, and he could have sworn that its skin was the rich yellow of pure gold.

"I think you're getting warmer," rattled the dry voice.

"Sod off," said John, yawning as he put the apple on his bedside table. "And if you don't let me sleep, I swear to God that I'll toss you in the bins downstairs."

**Notes: **

Mostly, this chapter is based on The Princess on the Glass Hill, but I slipped in some other things:  
1. The woman with half her face covered is Hel of Norse mythology's underworld, and the conditions she sets are those she gave for the return of Balder to the living.  
2. The small man is Finvarra, the most important of the Daoine Sidhe of Ireland, thought by some to be the King of the Dead. A skilled chess player, mortals often challenged him in high-stakes games only to lose everything they possessed. I, er, took the liberty of imagining that he could play for somebody's life.  
3. The white rooster and the gray dog are from the Ilocano epic Biag ni Lam-Ang (The Life of Lam-Ang), where the hero is killed by a giant fish, and is brought back to life by his wife and those two aforesaid land animals.


	3. Swish-Smack

**Part Two: Swish-Smack**

On the next Wednesday, John fell asleep on the sofa. He usually knew better than to do this, because his Thursday dreams were bad enough without a crick in his back in the bargain, but he was tired, and (this was the clincher) he was trying to finish a DVD. One of the other doctors at the surgery had lent it to him, and he'd never gotten around to watching it, even though it had been skulking around the flat for about a month. Its owner was starting to make noises about wanting it back in the foreseeable future, and John, perhaps unwisely, had promised to return it on Friday. He started on it the minute he got back to the flat, not even bothering to put away his new iron skillet (the first step in a small quest to acquire a more advanced set of cooking skills) or the two loaves of whole wheat bread he'd bought on the way home (the baker, about to close up for the day, had sold them to him for the price of one, promising that each loaf was filling enough to feed a ravenous hound).

He kept meaning to tidy up, to go to bed properly, with pillows and sheets and a mattress, but he never managed it. One minute he was taking issue with a bit of dialogue, sitting up to correct the television ("'When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east'? Thanks, but I don't intend to wait that long."), and the next he was continuing his conversation with the baker, who was rather shorter than he'd been this afternoon, and, come to think of it, looked a bit like Peter Dinklage.

"I'm sorry," said John, because he was also coming to terms with the fact that he had a fat loaf of bread under each arm and his iron skillet in his right hand. "What was that again about the time?"

The man gave him a mildly impatient look, and repeated himself. There are rules, and there are rules, and this time John was told that he had to be out of the gates by the time the clock struck six, or they would close and he would be shut in forever.

John nodded, thanked the man, and was about to go on his way when it occurred to him that there was something that didn't fit here, something absurdly out of place. "Hang on," he said. "'When the clock strikes _six'_? Don't you mean 'twelve'?"

The dwarf shrugged. "Normally I would," he admitted, "but it's half past twelve already."

That felt deeply unfair (there were two twelve o'clocks in a day weren't there?), and the doctor opened his mouth to argue, but stopped himself, on the grounds that doing so might not be in his best interests. The dwarf saw this and nodded in what seemed to be approval.

"Off you go!" he said, waving John onwards. "And don't forget what I said about the bread!"

John Watson walked on, carrying his bread and his skillet, through a landscape that looked steadily more familiar the further he went. Eventually he came to a road, and he followed it with a warm West Wind blowing at his back (so warm, in fact, that he wished he'd left off his jumper) until he came to the gates of Baskerville. There was something in there that he needed, more than a magical cure-all and a kingdom in its entirety.

At this point, John decided that the universe was _definitely_playing silly buggers with him.

Nevertheless he stood at the gate and called to be let in, as polite as he could manage in a raised voice. When nobody took any notice, he tried again, louder this time, promising that he'd be quick and no trouble at all, and he wasn't trying to trick anybody into anything this time, besides that had been Sherlock, he'd used his own ID (though admittedly he had played the role that Sherlock had needed of him to the hilt), and still the gate remained shut.

Keenly aware that he was working against a deadline, John shouted once more and knocked on the gate with his iron skillet – once, twice, and three times. The metal links rattled and clanged, and the gate slid open, as smooth as you please, and the doctor stepped right through.

No sooner had he done so than two gigantic hounds came bounding at him. Each was the size of a horse, with fur aglow and great, round, red eyes as big as any of the faces on the Clock Tower of London. They growled and barked fit to make the ground shake, and they bared their teeth, all very white and very sharp.

It would have been impressive if John hadn't seen the like before. He held his ground, and, remembering what the backer had said about his bread (and also praying to any god who might be listening that the man was right), he threw a loaf to each dog as they leapt at him. Great jaws closed around the bread, and the dogs immediately fell to eating.

With the hounds of Baskerville thus pacified, John went on with no further trouble (as he walked past, he saw that one of them had 'Lyons' on its collar, and he wouldn't have been surprised if the other one turned out to be named 'Barrymore'). It wasn't until he reached the main building that he realized that perhaps the reason for his unhindered progress was that everyone in the military base was asleep, right down to the rabbits glowing softly in their hutches and the fruit flies resting on the walls of their jars.

He picked his way, as quiet as a reasonably conscientious mouse, through a long line of rooms. In one of them, there was an impressive display of jewelry, mostly rings, that he certainly hadn't seen the last time he was in Baskerville, and another was filled with arms and armor. John dawdled among those for a bit, tempted to take something (there was nothing that said he couldn't), but decided against it in the end. None of them were what he was looking for, he didn't know how to use a sword or a battle axe, and, when it came to firearms, he had a perfectly serviceable Browning at home, which he knew inside and out. Besides, if anything came up now, he had his skillet.

He did, however, stoop to pick up what turned out to be a crumpled coupon for more bread that had been left lying on the floor.

In the next room, he was met by a woman who reminded him, in various ways and varying degrees, of _every_woman he'd ever found attractive. It was a little disconcerting, not least – and John would wrap his head around this, give him a minute – because she was the only person he'd seen awake in all of Baskerville.

"Hello," she said, throwing her arms around his neck and giving him a friendly kiss on the cheek, like Sarah used to do at the surgery. "Got any plans for tonight?"

"Er, I do, actually," said John, fingers curling tightly around the handle of his skillet. "I need something from in here and I haven't found it yet."

"Yes, I don't think you know where to look. It's in the courtyard beyond the room after this one," said the woman, and she kissed him on the mouth, lightly, like Beth had before she shyly insinuated that he didn't need to take her home all that early after their first date when they were both fifteen. "You're sure you don't want to stay a while?"

John wet his lips. On any other day of the week, this would have been a very good dream indeed. "Sorry," he said quickly, before he landed himself in trouble. "I can't. I've got-"

"A time limit. I know, six o'clock." She tossed her head, exactly like Jeanette and slightly (_terrifyingly_) like Lena Headey. Then her face softened, and she sighed like Clara so often had over Harry. "Well, if you change your mind, give me a ring," she said, and she plucked the coupon from his fingers and scribbled what was presumably her phone number on the back of it. She shoved the clip of paper deep into the back pocket of his jeans, fairly groping him like that girl in the club on his last night out before deployment. "You look tired, though," she added, sounding the tiniest bit like Cate Blanchett. "Why don't you rest for a bit? I'll let you kip at the end of my bed."

John was about to protest, but she led him to the next room (that's where he was headed anyway, wasn't it?) where there was a beautiful bed, freshly made with white, white sheets and a small army of pillows. It looked so inviting and there was such a nice breeze coming in through the West-facing window that he decided that no harm would come from just sitting on it. And once he'd sat on the bed, he found that it was so soft that he simply had to lie down, just for a while. And as soon as he'd lain down and pulled the wonderful down-stuffed duvet up to his chin, he thought that there would be no trouble with his closing his eyes, just for a second. It was just starting to drift through his brain, slowly, as though his thoughts were mired in treacle, that falling asleep_while_he was asleep might be more than a little problematic, when he went and did exactly that.

The doctor would have stayed there for a very long time – perhaps forever – if a vigorous West Wind hadn't blown in through the window and lifted the duvet right off of him. John swore sleepily and reached for the duvet, swore again when he came to his senses and realized just what he should be doing, and he swore a third time when he realized he was wasting time by swearing. He sprang up immediately and ran for the courtyard.

A fountain stood in the middle of that grassy space, and it was adorned with marble statues frolicking under the spray of clear, bright water. The said frolicking could politely be called lascivious, urns or no urns, and just looking at the thing made John blush to the tips of his ears. One of the statues – a marble maiden – was standing apart from her fellows. She was holding a black silk cushion (and John knew he'd seen that fabric in the wash, once upon a time) and on that cushion was a golden riding crop.

"You've got to be joking," said John in stark disbelief, and he picked it up and ran. He hurried away through this strange, sleeping version of Baskerville, looking neither to the left nor to the right, clutching the riding crop and the skillet close to his chest as he went. An alarm began to sound just as he reached the gate, and it banged shut so quickly that it took off a bit of his heel as he went through.

John awoke to the din of an alarm that he _knew_he hadn't set, because it was a thrice-damned Thursday, he_never_ set his alarm on Thursdays. Blinking blearily, he reached for his phone to make the thing stop screaming at him, and discovered, with no little discomfort, that his left ankle was badly scraped. His mood was not improved by the fact that his bread had gone missing, or that what had last night been his nice, new skillet was now all scratched and battered.

There was nothing to be done about either bread or skillet, however, so John set himself to finding the remote so that he could turn off the television and get himself what sleep he could in his bed. The device had wedged itself deep in between the cushions of the sofa, and when he pulled it out of its hiding place, a riding crop came with it.

This riding crop was a good deal more fanciful than the one Sherlock had, or even the one he'd seen at Irene Adler's house: its handle and the little fold of leather at the business end were colored a deep yellow with a dull shine to it, and if that wasn't meant to evoke gold, then John Watson was an idiot for true. He took it with him to the bedroom, and set it on the little table so it could keep last week's apple company.

As he undressed, a coupon fluttered out of the pocket of his jeans. It promised him a 50% discount at the local bakery for a week, which seemed rather extravagant, but John resolved to try it anyway. What he _wouldn't_try was the phone number written in a distinctly feminine hand on the back of it. Apples and riding crops and coupons were one thing, but he wanted no truck with strange phone numbers, thank you very much.

"You're definitely warmer now," creaked the dry voice.

"Sod off," said John as he got into bed (which was ever so slightly less satisfactory after the one in last night's dream). "And if you don't let me sleep, I swear to God I'll use you for football practice."

**Notes:**

This chapter is mostly built around The Water of Life from the Brothers Grimm, but:  
1. Baskerville and the hounds seemed to fit better than the original lions, and, well, we did have a Corporal Lyons, didn't we? The dogs' description is from The Tinderbox.  
2. Since the Brothers Grimm weren't clear on what they meant by 'enchanted princes' I stole the sleeping people and animals from Sleeping Beauty.  
3. This is a very minor point and has nothing to do with fairy tales, but as far as I know, rabbits - things - with the GFP gene spliced into them wouldn't _actually_ glow in the dark. They'd glow under UV light. /science (Sorry.)  
4. John, of course, fell asleep watching a _Game of Thrones_ DVD.


	4. Heed No Nightly Noises

**Part Three: Heed No Nightly Noises**

John Watson took the apple and the riding crop – tangible things that he could see and hold and smell (and probably taste too, if he fancied it, though he didn't find that idea very appealing) – as proof that he wasn't completely losing his mind, and that maybe, just maybe, the dreams were amounting to something more than a weekly disturbance. Of course, if he thought about it in another way, they could be taken as a sign that he'd_already_lost his mind, and was just two steps and a jig away from being institutionalized. Nobody else had seen them after all, and he half suspected that he'd have nothing to show if he suddenly felt like sharing.

Whatever the case actually was, he faced the prospect of the next Thursday's dreams with considerably less trepidation. And that, in turn, helped him keep his composure when someone walked up to him outside a restaurant, spat in his face, and stalked off without a word. John didn't know her. She could have been anyone – an earlier client of Sherlock's, a relative of somebody who'd been convicted on Sherlock's evidence, a disgruntled ex-fan – and going after her, he felt, just wasn't worth the trouble. Greg, who he'd met for dinner to discuss the murder of a painter's wife and her supposed lover (the D.I. was only just getting back into good graces at New Scotland Yard and thus could not be seen toting John to crime scenes), was shocked and affronted, not least because John did nothing more than swear a bit and reach for his pocket handkerchief. He'd have gone after to her to issue a sharp rebuke at the very least if the doctor hadn't stopped him.

"It's all right," said John, wiping his face and weighing the merits of ducking back into the restaurant for a quick wash in the restroom. Then he realized what he'd said, and corrected himself, "Well, no, it's not. But it happens, and it could have been worse. Much worse. You probably get it too."

"Yeah," said Greg darkly, "but I'm a copper. I've _had_to learn not to let shit like that turn my head."

"And I was a soldier in Afghanistan. We weren't exactly popular with everyone." John smiled to make light of it, and started to walk. "Anyway," he continued as Greg fell in beside him, "it's not all bad. Have you seen that graffiti they still do? The 'I believe in Sherlock Holmes' stuff? That's nice."

"Illegal too, but not my division anymore, thank God." Greg gave John a close look and put a hand on his shoulder. "C'mon, let's go for a pint. You look like you could use one."

On any other day of the week, John would have welcomed the invitation, with buckets (or perhaps glasses or mugs or even tankards) of enthusiasm. But as it was, he checked his watch, though there was no real need to, and said, "No, I can't, sorry. I, er, need to get some sleep."

"Sleep in tomorrow then. Isn't Thursday your day off?"

"Yes, but this is important." John realized as he said it that it didn't sound right. In fact, it fell very much in the realm of feeble excuses.

And, indeed, Greg looked at him askance. "Suddenly getting the full eight hours is important?"

"Well, it's supposed to be. And it's not that. It's—" He hesitated, pressed his lips together. The last thing, the very last thing he wanted was for the D.I. to think he was pushing him away, but telling him the whole truth might do as much harm as not saying anything. He sighed. "I get these dreams," he said. "Not _of_Sherlock, but about him. Sort of. Every Thursday morning, like clockwork." And he stopped there, unsure of how much explaining would be too much. "They're important," he said weakly.

"Christ," said Greg. He was quiet for a little while, as if he was trying to decide which part of John's statement to latch on to. "_Every_Thursday?" he said at last.

"Clockwork," repeated John with a slightly strained grin. "Ever since." He didn't have to elaborate on that.

"Christ," said Greg again. There wasn't much else he could add to that. He knew John was already seeing a therapist (though God knew how effective that really was), and, frankly, he knew that sometimes you just had to get by in whatever way you could. Still, he had to ask, "It's been three years, John. Doesn't that scare you?"

The doctor didn't even need to think about it. "I'm not afraid," he said, and it was true.

It was still true as he got ready for bed in his empty flat (a worried-looking Greg had dropped him home), and it was true when he found himself following the bouncing ball. It was small and blue and rubber, and he was almost certain that he'd seen it before. The thing was also going so fast that he almost had to jog to keep up until it finally stopped at the foot of a mountain where there was a path leading upwards, weaving this way and that through vast heaps of big black stones on each side. There was something he needed at the end of it, more than a source of great knowledge or any number of home improvements. The way was steep and difficult, but John figured it couldn't possibly be as difficult as the glass hill.

But he hadn't counted on the voices. There were a thousand of them or more, and they started the instant he set foot on the path. They began as a murmur, low and undeniably nasty, and their insults grew closer and clearer with every step he took until they drowned out the wind blustering through the stones.

There are rules, and there are rules. John had been through this before, or, rather, something similar, and he knew that turning his head would be an incredibly bad idea. He tried to think of the long empty corridor of an earlier dream, of what Lestrade had said the previous evening, of what he told himself about not listening to what people said, and grit his teeth. It wasn't, he thought, as though he hadn't heard any of it before.

"Liar," was frequent, a sort of foul beat setting the tempo. "How can you be sure he's even a doctor? Isn't he just some kind of mascot?" scoffed a voice to his left. "He just wanted his fifteen seconds of fame and couldn't get it on his own, the great bleeding dupe," said another to his right. And on and on they went, with the insults becoming worse and worse until John found it a struggle to go on.

"Sticks and stones," he told himself, doggedly putting one foot in front of the other, and didn't finish, having decided in mid-sentence that whoever had come up with that saying was an idiot.

He tried swearing right back at the voices (he lost count of how many times he did this, but if the other saying was true, the air around him should have turned a vivid, unmistakable blue), but that only worked for so long. The voices began to take his words and hurl them back at him, all twisted yet still recognizable as his, which, if anything, made their jeering and taunting even worse. He was about to see what they'd make of his sticking his fingers in his ears and humming when one voice, right next to his ear said, "Leave him. The poor man thinks he knows what he's doing. Let him find out that he's wrong on his own."

It was as sardonic and supercilious as Mycroft at his worst, and, come to think of it, it sounded a bit like Mycroft too – no, wait, it sounded _exactly_like Mycroft, and John, harassed and harried, forgot himself and turned to tell the British government just what he thought of a man who as good as set a psychopath on his own brother.

John awoke unable to move. He was pins and needles all over, from his toes to his neck, and it hurt excruciatingly when he finally managed to crook an elbow. Heart pounding, he glanced at his clock and saw that it was only fourteen minutes past one.

A weak kind of relief washed over him as he dropped his head back on his pillow. Dawn was some way off yet, so it stood to (_wild, hopeful_) reason that he could get into the dream again. Not that he'd ever tried it before and after so decisive a failure at that, but he was closer than he'd even been in three years worth of Thursdays, and, while the dreaming itself didn't scare him, there was no way to describe how endlessly frightened he was the he wouldn't get another chance if he couldn't get things right this week. He had to at least _try_. Thus resolved, John turned on his side and closed his eyes.

Almost immediately, he found himself following the little ball again. John didn't have time to be thankful for that, as this time it was going so fast that he needed to break into a run to keep up, and run he did until it led him back to the mountain and its veritable army of black stones. The trick, thought John, hovering at the foot of the path, was to pay no attention to the voices. He could do that. It wasn't easy, but he knew what was coming now, and, Hell, didn't he put up with a lot of it in real life?

"I can take you," he told the black stones and the empty air, and he started on his way up.

As before, the voices started up when he set foot on the path, and they quickly swelled from a vicious murmur to a loud chorus of yells that the wind could do nothing to dull. Though it seemed to be trying its best, all its soughing managed to do was parch John's throat and chap his lips.

"Liar" was there again, though there was a venom to it that sounded distinctly ex-girlfriend. "Queer," hissed an angry group to his right. "…and fucking him in the bargain," conjectured a withering voice to his left. "Good job that, being a live-in PR man." "He didn't even know he was being had," said another one, and its syrupy condescension made it even worse. "In more ways than one," added yet another, dirtily. And they laughed and jeered as John Watson trundled on.

It was hurtful, and John didn't know which were worse: the bits that were definitely not true, despite what everyone seemed to think, or the bits that he wished were true, in the deepest, darkest corners of his heart, and hadn't been given the chance to find if they could be or not. The suggestions and conjectures became filthier and more lewd until John felt his face turn red from shame and he could hear the thudding of his pulse in his ears. The going was harder this time, and he had barely gotten half as far as he had the first time when a taunting voice so close that he ought to have felt its breath on the back of his neck said, "What do you want me to make them say _next_, Johnny-boy?"

John had only heard that voice four times before, but he _knew_ that lilt and those cadences, even if their owner tended to disregard him in favor of a brighter luminary. And, having recognized the voice, he forgot himself and turned, fully expecting to come face to face with James Moriarty.

What happened instead was that he fell out of bed, tangled in his sheets and numb all over. For several long, dreadful seconds, he couldn't move an inch or even call for help (not that there was anyone to call, but he thought that the people in the next flat might be persuaded to call 999 if he made enough of a ruckus). Eventually, he was able to wiggle his fingers, and after a longer while, he managed to sit up and kick himself free of the sheets. It was thirty-seven minutes past three, and John, shaking and sweating, decided he would be much better for a drink of water.

The thought soon became the deed, and John was pouring himself a glass of cold water from the fridge. He gulped down the first half and that calmed him down; and he sipped at the rest of it and that cleared his head. Dawn wasn't all that far away, but he had some time yet, and he was going to get back into that dream if it killed him.

Perhaps, he thought, considering it carefully, the trick _wasn't_ not letting the voices make you turn your head. Perhaps the trick was finding a way to ignore them entirely.

On the strength of that idea, John stopped in the bathroom and stuffed his ears with cotton from the medicine cabinet, hoping he'd done a good enough job to block out sound, but not so good a job as to necessitate a visit to another doctor to get the cotton plugs out afterwards (_that would be unnecessarily embarrassing_). Satisfied that he couldn't hear a thing, he went back to bed.

Soon he was pelting after the little blue ball once more, and this time it was bouncing along at a speed that would have let John win the London Marathon if he could keep it up for that long. Fortunately, it led him back to the path before he was completely winded, and he stood at the foot of the mountain, looking up at all those large, black rocks. Now that he was paying attention, they all looked to be about human size, but that wasn't a thought he wanted to dwell on.

John began to climb, and he almost laughed out loud when he realized how well the cotton was working. He heard none of the vitriolic muttering, and what echoes he did hear as the voices got louder were as distant and inconsequential as the sea-sound in a shell. The voices could tell how little they were affecting him, and it made them angrier than ever. They raged and screamed, and John might have heard them yet if the hot South Wind hadn't blown so hard amongst the stones as to drown the voices out.

"Don't you lot have bodies to go home to? Or have they all asked for a divorce?" John asked, when he was halfway up and so far from letting the noise vex him that he was nearly jovial. "Not that I'd blame them for not wanting you around. Unless you're all nicer at home?"

At this, the voices shouted all the louder until John could feel the air vibrating against his skin with their curses. The very rocks seemed to be shaking along with it, and the doctor began to worry about the likelihood of an avalanche. Keeping himself from turning his head would be the least of his worries if he was caught in a tumbling cascade of those black rocks with their hard faces and jagged edges.

"Look here," he demanded, three quarters of the way from the peak, "and I think this is a perfectly reasonable question, given the circumstances: what have I _ever_ done to you?"

Something howled raucously against his ear in response, and a high, thin yowling followed on his other side, and the ill-natured din went on and on without pause for breath or thought (John had to admit a grudging admiration for their apparently boundless, if gravely misplaced, creativity). But the cotton held and the wind roared, and it wasn't much longer before the doctor reached the end of the path at the top of the mountain and the noise about him died down in a whirring and a humming.

In the sudden silence, which in itself was something of a shock, John Watson straightened up and peered about him. The area was clear of black rocks, rather as if none of them had been able to make it so far, and at the center of the otherwise empty space was what looked like – and John had to blink a couple of times to be sure – a proper lab bench. It had shelves for reagents, and gas fixtures, and electric sockets, and a deep sink with a high, arched faucet at one end, and its black surface had been wiped clean with what smelled like ethanol alternated with Lysol. In the middle of that disinfected surface was a cushion of white silk (and John knew that material very well indeed), and resting on that, creating a rather deep depression, was a golden microscope.

"Oh, for God's sake!" exclaimed John, and he would have said a good deal more if he hadn't been so flabbergasted. Shaking his head, he picked up the microscope with both hands, and turned to go before things got any weirder.

The third time he awoke, the sky above London was starting to lighten. John was stiff, but not overly so, and as he stretched to get rid of the worst of it, he barked his shins on something hard hidden beneath his blankets. Grumbling muzzily, he threw the covers back and found a microscope on his bed.

It was a fairly old one, with three objectives (low power, high power, and oil immersion), the sort of eyepiece that only lets you look with one eye at a time, and a mirror at the bottom instead of a light. And as if a mysterious microscope appearing in his bed wasn't strange enough, every metal surface of it was gold plated, from the adjustment knobs to the stage clips.

It had to be one of the most impractical objects John had ever seen.

He made space for it on the bedside table by putting his lamp on the floor, and, after checking to see if his bedclothes were hiding anything else – a jeweled pipettor perhaps, or a diamond stirring rod – he curled up to get a bit more sleep in before the sun came all the way up.

"You're positively hot," clacked the dry voice.

"Sod off," said John, squeezing his eyes shut. "And if you don't let me sleep, I swear to God I will jump on you until I get blisters or," he finished feebly for this week had been more trying than most, "until I think of anything even more unpleasant to do."

**Notes:**

This chapter is mostly based on The Story of Two Sisters Who Were Jealous of Their Younger Sister from Andrew Lang's _Arabian Nights Entertainments_ (Though, actually, those two jealous sisters didn't come into the story much - it was mostly about their niece and two nephews who loved each other very much and weren't envious of each other at all. Though they did make things happen, those two sisters. I'll stop now, sorry.) Other references include the following:  
1. The chapter title is from Tom Bombadil in _The Fellowship of the Ring_: "Fear nothing! Have peace until the morning! Heed no nightly noises!"  
2. Some lines (and the concept of a body filing for divorce from its mind) have been borrowed from _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ and _The Restaurant at the End of the Universe_.  
3. And because I started to run out of words for sounds, I cannibalized a lot of them from the djinns in Eleanor Hoffmann's _Mischief in Fez_. It's a wonderful story, not least because of the vivid picture it paints of Morocco. I dreamed about hot mint tea, pigeon stews, and jasmine blossoms for ages - though it also warns you of the dangers of eating in the dark and carelessly abandoning the clothes you change out of.  
4. And this has been a very self-indulgent set of notes.


	5. The North Wind Doth Blow

**Part Four: The North Wind Doth Blow**

There was nothing unusual about the rain on the next Wednesday night, not even if you counted John getting caught in the downpour on his way home. It was annoying, to be sure, especially since he might have avoided it if he hadn't stopped to buy milk, but it was the sort of thing you expected London weather to do. After a bit of a grumble and a nice, hot shower, John had no trouble falling asleep to the sound of raindrops tapping away on his windowpane. He pulled the blanket up to his chin, settling in for this Thursday's dream, whatever it was.

But at midnight, before he could do more than doze lightly, there arose such a fearful and tremendous noise that the earth and the heavens seemed to shake with it, never mind the thin walls of John's little flat. The doctor was jolted quite rudely out of his sleep to find that the blameless London rain had turned into an almighty storm. It was nothing short of jarring, but John had been a soldier, and before that he'd been a medical student and an intern, and if that hadn't prepared him for getting what sleep he could while he could get it, even under the most adverse conditions, he didn't know what would. So, unperturbed, he pulled the bedclothes over his head to muffle the din, and shut his eyes against the overwhelming noise and sudden, hard flashes of light.

The storm seemed to follow him into his dreams, however, filling them with sound and tempestuous fury. The landscape splintered and shifted with each mighty thunderclap, twisted eye-wateringly like the patterns in a kaleidoscope, and John had to struggle to keep up with the changes. He trudged through a blizzard, snow blowing into his open jacket and his shoes, with his hands cupped protectively around something small and warm and feathery – a bird? – nestled close against his collar. He was caught in a gale so fierce and powerful that he thought it would shatter his very bones, leaving not a single one of them whole, and scatter the bits so that he'd never be whole again. He rode the storm itself as it roared through the sky, blowing down woods and houses and power lines, and, once over the sea, sending up waves so great that they dashed against John's heels, and he could easily imagine that ships were wrecked by the hundreds in its wake.

It should have been frightening, what with the lightning making all the hair on his body stand on end and the thunder making his ears ring like hammer blows to the head, but what truly scared John was that none of it seemed to be accomplishing anything. He stayed a breath away from waking, always very much aware of the dip in the mattress, the weight of the blanket tangled about his legs, and the soft noises he made in his sleep, even as he felt the sea spray soak him to his knees. And sometimes he came all the way awake, spending several long heartbeats listening to thunder that sounded like it was being made by stone-giants hurling boulders at one another only to fall back into uneasy dreams where the thunder _was_being made by stone-giants hurling boulders at one another.

Still, John did his best to stay asleep, because he had to, because it was necessary, because God knew what would happen if he did not dream this week, and though He was not inclined to share the details, John suspected it would not be anything good.

Yet it soon became clear that sleep was impossible. John Watson had spent a full fifteen minutes awake when there was a bright flash of lightning so close that he saw it through his eyelids. Its crash of thunder followed immediately, and that, in turn, was punctuated by a nasty pop-crackle-hiss. The streetlights he could see through the water lashing against his window winked out, and the world went completely dark.

There might, John thought, be a metaphor of some sort there, but when it became apparent that nothing more meaningful would happen, he made his way to the kitchenette by memory and by touch. He fumbled in the cupboards for matches and a candle, and spent the rest of that wild night sitting by its soft glow at the kitchen table, with his head in his hands. If the dry voice had anything to say about that, he did not hear it.

Though it had blown as if it would not stop until it reached the end of the world, eventually, after much too long, the storm began to die down, losing speed fitfully, as though it was fighting weariness every step of the way. By the time the sun came up, all that was left of it was a light, innocent drizzle.

John scrubbed his eyes, stretched, stood, and, finding that the power had come back on, he started up the kettle. He turned on the television while he waited for it to boil, half-expecting to hear that Parliament was flooded, that the Thames had risen up like an angry river god to swallow the Embankment and sweep the bridges away, but it was nothing so bad as that.

The storm had been undeniably vicious, however, and what was most alarming was that it had been entirely unexpected: It had blown in without warning from the North Sea. An alarmed Met Office put it down to climate change, and took the opportunity to remind the general population to make a serious effort to reduce their carbon footprints and energy consumption, if this wasn't the sort of thing they wanted to leave for future generations.

It seemed like the worst of it had been a few power outages and a bit of flooding, but it was still bad enough that a worried Greg phoned John to check on him, just as he was lowering his tea bag into the hot water. And John, as soon as Greg ended the call, put down his mug and rang Mrs. Hudson.

She was all right, she said lightly, and so was her flat. But 221C was flooded ("That's the trouble with basements, it's no wonder I can't get anyone interested in it"), and the windows of 221B were shattered ("Some flying debris, I expect, and the mess it's made – it's a good thing we put Sherlock's papers and things in those crates, I hate to think of the state of things if we'd left them lying around"). As always, she sounded unshaken, and because she was Mrs. Hudson, that was probably the simple truth rather than her putting on a brave face. Nevertheless, John offered to come over to help, and she thanked him, saying that she had only yesterday done some baking and that it would be nice to share the biscuits with him.

John quickly downed his tea and a slice of toast, and got ready to go out. But once he was back in his room, it was hard not to think of what had come – or what had not come – of this Thursday's dreams. After three weeks of what felt like significant progress, after three years of vivid dreams, this morning's vague and fretful impressions were worrying in the extreme. 'Worrying', in fact, was too small a word to encompass John's feelings on the matter: he felt very small and helpless and crushed in ways that were terrifyingly familiar, echoes of the state of his mind when he'd been living in that awful bedsit, before Sherlock, before everything. He had to take a moment, because it was a bit too much for him to push through with a brave face (he was not Mrs. Hudson, bless her tough little heart), and he sat on his bed with his shirt half-buttoned, reminding himself to breathe.

He stared for a long while at the microscope, the riding crop, and the apple, and he touched each of them, reassuring himself that they were not about to go anywhere, despite not having been added to this time around. His fingers lingered on the fruit, and, on impulse, he snatched it up. He kept it on the foot of the bed while he finished dressing, and he slipped it into his jacket, for security, before he left for Baker Street.

Mrs. Hudson greeted him with a quick hug, tutted over the dark circles under his red eyes, and made him sit down for a cuppa (and a couple of biscuits) before they started on the mess.

"But I understand, dear," she said. "I was shaking like an aspen leaf all night, and hardly got a wink of sleep. All that thunder!"

John gave her a wry smile over his teacup. "Yes, it was rather terrible," he agreed, though he had more than the weather on his mind.

"Well, at least some good came of it," said Mrs. Hudson lightly, dropping a lump of sugar into her herbal soother.

That took John aback. "You think so?"

"The North Wind blew you back to Baker Street, didn't it? I know I'm being silly, but it _has_ been a while since you last came to visit. Would you like another biscuit? Don't be shy, dear, I'm not your landlady."

xxx

**Notes:**There isn't a particular fairy tale here: mostly it's drawn from the bit in East of the Sun and West of the Moon where the girl rides the North Wind, though I did draw on elements and wording from a few other stories. The dreams John did have were taken from Kotura, Lord of the Winds (Siberia), The Storm Fiend (Turkey), and the "Over Hill and Under Hill" chapter of The Hobbit. Some imagery was also taken from these here apocalyptic illustrations that I stumbled across while doing what passes for research. I also read The Lad Who Went to the North Wind and Aesop's The North Wind and the Sun for reference, and could not resist making a very, very small mention of hammers *coughMjolnircough*.

Oh, and the chapter title is, of course, from the nursery rhyme!


End file.
